Hello world in 5 minutes

May 3, 2019

Jan Cerman

Learn the basics of creating, publishing, and displaying your content with Kentico Cloud. In this introductory tutorial, you will build a simple website powered by Kentico Cloud from start to finish. If you are new to the concept of a headless CMS, this is a great place to get started.

Table of contents

If you do not have your Kentico Cloud account yet, sign up at https://app.kenticocloud.com/sign-up. After creating an account and signing in, you will see the content of a sample project, which you won't need now.

Creating a Kentico Cloud project

Project is the primary organizational unit of your content.

To create a new project:

Click the project switcher in the top left.

Click My projects.

Click Create new project in the top right corner.

Type a name for your project, for example Hello World.

Click Create project.

Open a list of your Kentico Cloud projects

The new project is created and selected as active. Now you can model the first content type.

Creating a content type

Content types (sometimes called content models, or content templates) define the structure of a piece of content – a content item. They are made of content elements such as texts and images.

A content type can be used by a single content item (for example, a homepage) or by many content items (for example, each article can be based on the same Article content type).

Now create a content type for a homepage with a headline, some text, and a picture:

In the app menu, choose Content models {@icon-content-models@}.

Click Create new.

Type Homepage in Content type name.

Drop in a Text element and name it Headline.

Drop in a Rich text element and name it Body text.

Drop in an Asset element and name it Picture.

Click Save.

That's it, your content type is ready to use.

A Homepage content type for use as a template

Creating a content item

You can now create a content item based on the new Homepage content type.

In the app menu, choose Content & Assets {@icon-content-and-assets@}.

Click Create new.

Choose Homepage as the content type.

Type Hello Headless World in Content item name.

Fill in the Headline and Body text text elements.

Upload an image to the Picture asset element. If you like, you can use our headless horseman.

Tip: Change the project ID of the API call to yours to display your own content. Make sure the codenames still match.

What's next?

Working directly with the API interface is fine for small tasks and simple websites. The API reference is your friend. For more complex projects, however, you will want to use a platform-specific SDK or write your own.